Anyone who has been patient enough to read through the foregoing long description of the Victorian Hinton, will gather that it was not a building which was particularly sympathetic to me, and it is not surprising that for a number of years before my father's death I had been considering how I could convert it into a house which I would find agreeable. I naturally made no mention of this intention to my father who would I fear have been horrified both at the idea of altering the structure and also at the capital, which he had carefully accumulated, being used for this purpose. For a number of years after the transformation had taken place I would have a dream, it amounted I think to a nightmare, that my father had somehow come to life again and that I was under the necessity of explaining to him what had occurred.
My grandfather had clearly been an enthusiastic builder and no doubt my love for bricks and mortar was inherited from him, although our tastes were very different - and who shall say which was the better. At least, however, I had a clearer conception of planning. My father lived to a ripe age: when he died in January 1935 he was within a few days of his 88th birthday. I was 36, which is quite a satisfactory age for starting on a building project of some size; the basic lines of my plans had had time to mature. I was not sorry, it must be owned, to have adequate excuse for making radical alterations at Hinton, for, though I loved the place, the atmosphere of the house was not to me a happy one. I could reverse what Edward Gibbon had written of Buriton and to say that during my youth I had there passed 'some light and many heavy hours'.
My general intention was to uncover the central Georgian block with its five south windows, build an entirely new block on the west side of it with a dining-room facing south, and give the whole an eighteenth-century appearance with Georgian sash-windows and a parapet above the first floor with the second floor in a Mansard roof. The north-pointing foot of the 'L'-shaped wing was to be cut off, the second floor eliminated, and a parapet as on the main block to be carried round, where the gables had been, with a low mansard behind it. The windows, however, were to be left as a memento of the Victorian phase. This was a mistake, I think, as they are very ugly.
With this broad outline sketched out, I put the enterprise into the capable hands of Lord Gerald Wellesley and Mr. Trenwith Wills, who were in partnership as architects. The planning of the main block was fairly simple for most of the existing walls were to be retained. Indeed on the ground floor, apart from the building of a new dining-room, the only alteration was to move the dividing wall between the library and the existing dining-room, so that the former was lighted by three windows and the room adjoining, which became my sitting-room, by two. This, I think, must have been the original arrangement. The drawing-room was to be given a swelling, semicircular bay-window in place of the battlemented Victorian monstrosity, and the new dining-room was similarly treated so that the main block was completely symmetrical. On the first floor there was to be a generous supply of bathrooms - had too long suffered from a scarcity - and this by the suppression of a few small rooms was easily achieved, so that there were seven principal bedrooms and six bathrooms.
The planning of the main block was fairly straightforward, but the service wing was more complex. Not only was the wing smaller, but also the domestic arrangements had to be planned for a way of life quite different and far more restricted than had been envisaged in my grandfather's day. All this, and a mass of detail took many months of anxious thought and discussion to prepare, but eventually the plans and elevations were finalized, and seemed to me very satisfactory. I could hardly believe I was to live in a house I could look at without pain.
The rather long delay, in fact, was of no consequence, for obviously it would be impossible to live in the house during this drastic transformation, and we, as a family, had to be accommodated elsewhere. My mother was the first to leave Hinton in the early summer of 1936. With admirable forethought my father had bought for her some years before his death a charming small Queen Anne house, Bramdean Manor, which adjoined the Hinton property. Thither she went, as soon as some alterations had been made, with the utmost joy and relief. At last she had a small house which was truly her own and to which she could do as she wished. She passed the remaining 11 years of her life there in great happiness. The rest of the family dispersed soon after, my sisters to various homes of their own, and I going to Bedhampton Manor, an agreeable old house in a not very agreeable locality near Havant, which I had inherited from my father and which happened to be vacant. As with my mother, this was the first occasion on which I had lived in a house in the country which seemed really my own, and my pleasure and contentment were unbounded. Thus by July 1936 the poor Victorian building at Hinton was standing grim and desolate awaiting the arrival of the housebreakers. It had been in existence for just on 70 years. This was the only moment, I think, that I had any qualms about the operation I had put into train. Many people had counselled prudence and waiting for a few years until my financial position was clearer; for death duties were not yet finally assessed, let alone paid, owing to the extraordinary dilatoriness of my father's solicitor. Only in the following year did it become apparent that this dilatoriness concealed fraudulence, and the fact that he was sent to prison for seven years provided no financial compensation for the large sums he had made away with. But had I delayed starting work, the war would have been upon us, the house as it stood would have been an obvious candidate for military occupation, and who knows what could have been done with it when the war ended.
Fortunately, however, I was still young enough to take no notice of sensible advice, and so the work proceeded. Before the end of July 1936 the forecourt was filled with the contractor's tackle and impedimenta. Two wooden huts had been set up, one for the contractor's foreman, the other for the clerk of the works, an admirable man who represented my interests. Between these two adjacent buildings a sort of Montagu and Capulet relationship persisted throughout the building operations.
Perhaps in order to make a good show at once, the contractor started by demolishing the northward end of the service wing. This, in fact, was an error. A reader who has had the patience to follow the previous chapter may remember that at the end of the bottom stroke of the 'L' there was a large servants' hall from which a staircase led up to three bedrooms on the two floors above. Had this end of the wing been temporarily left as an isolated tower, it would have afforded admirable accommodation for workmen. For accommodation was a major difficulty. Nowadays workmen have cars and can live or lodge anywhere within a radius of 10 miles or so of the site. In 1936 it was necessary to find beds in the close vicinity, and this was almost impossible. In the event those workmen who could find nothing better simply dossed down in the harness-room of the stables, where the conditions were such that they would have caused anxiety to the local Health Officer had he seen them.
After the demolition of the end of the wing, the next step was to break a gap right through the house on the west side of the original Georgian block to form a space for the new dining-room on the south side, and lavatories, a pantry and a stair on the north. The house thus temporarily in two parts had a very strange appearance, and those seeing it would say 'this looks like something from the Spanish Civil War'. Little did we then think that shortly we should have equally good similes from much nearer home.
Thus the work proceeded through the months, the straightforward lines of the neo-Georgian building gradually emerging through the Victorian Tudor as crockets, gables and battlements gave way to a brick parapet, and the plate glass and heavy stone mouldings of the windows were replaced by small paned sashes with wooden astrigals. Soon the angular and clumsy bows were torn down and serene, swelling bays began to rise on the drawing-room and new dining-room block. I had hoped that the south front of the Georgian block would have survived, but we found that once the nineteenth-century bow had been demolished and the windows altered there would have been almost nothing left of it, so this section was rebuilt from cellar level. In other parts much of the Victorian brickwork remained, and this when given natural coloured pointing, was quite pleasant in effect. Furthermore the stone quoins, which had weathered to an agreeable grey, were kept wherever possible, and the stone Gothic moulding which surrounded the main block was shaved flat, and so made an effective little feature below the first-floor windows.
Meanwhile I was scouring the country for internal features which could be incorporated in the new building. As it happened Robert Adam's Adelphi Terrace in London was to be demolished in 1937: a major crime in my opinion, but one from which I benefited considerably. A sale of fittings was held on the site, and bidding energetically I obtained a number of doors and architraves, carved window-shutters, and several chimney-pieces, two of which of simple Adam design in white marble were for the new dining-room and my own sitting-room. Soon after, in this iconoclastic year, Norfolk House in St. James's Square was also torn down, and here I bought many square yards of wide oak boards, and an attractive steel grate similar to the one in the Norfolk room in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This fitted well into a majestic Porphyry chimney-piece, originally at Hamilton Palace, which I had bought for the entrance hall.
Porphyry chimney-pieces are fairly rare, and I was delighted to hear from Lord Gerald Wellesley that he had heard of another. We went to see it at Staines where it was lying dismantled in a shed. It was a handsome Empire affair with good ormolu mounts, and obviously right in period for the Library which was to have a Regency aspect. The significance of the ormolu plaque in the frieze puzzled me for a long time. There were many figures but what exactly they were doing I could not determine. Some years later, however, going round the Vatican Gallery I went into a small room and there before me was the original fresco of my plaque. It was 'Le Nozze Aldobrandine' which dated from the Augustan age. It had been discovered on the Esquiline in 1605, and was removed to its present place in 1838. In the early nineteenth century it became a popular subject and was repeated in many forms. The group of female figures on the left-hand side were apparently giving last counsels and encouragement to the bride for the ordeal which lay before her, while the disconsolate male figure sitting on the edge of the bed was presumably the young husband. The scene did not suggest that a very happy night was in store.
The incorporation of the Adelphi woodwork undoubtedly delayed progress, and provided a valid excuse to the contractor for what seemed to me a slow advance. However, in view of the great amount of work which had to be done, I think I may have been rather impatient. But in the spring of 1938, seeing no chance of the house being finished for many months, I asked the contractor to concentrate on the service wing, so that I could return there while the main part of the house was still incomplete. Thus about midsummer of 1938 I was able to move into Hinton although the main rooms were still without floors or plaster.
As the summer advanced the threat of war became increasingly acute, and already the contractor was finding it difficult to obtain various materials, such as copper for the flat of the roof. The outlook became more and more grim, and I began to envisage being left with the empty shell of the house. No one, I feel bound to admit, could have welcomed the respite of the Munich agreement with greater warmth. With this national breather arranged, work continued on the house throughout the winter. I had decided that no decorations were to be done for six months after the work was completed in order to let the plaster on the walls dry thoroughly - quick-drying plaster was seemingly not then in use - but as it transpired it was more than six years before the rooms were painted.
The first room to become habitable in the main part of the house was the dining-room, and in the course of the winter I was able to use it as a sitting-room, a most welcome expansion, and since the service door opened into the kitchen passage there was no necessity to go through the unfinished entrance hall.
Maintaining a constant pressure the last workman was squeezed out of the house in the early summer of 1939, and, although the bare plaster walls were not very handsome, I was able to get my furniture out of store, put carpets down and curtains up, so that the house had a reasonable appearance.
Concentrating on my own interests, I was taking, I fear, little notice of international affairs. In the course of the summer I had been given the choice in the event of war of accommodating 40 children evacuated from London or of giving the house over to the Portsmouth Day School for Girls. The latter seemed the only possible of the two alternatives, but even the arrival of 100 camp-beds and various other impedimenta, which were stored in the cellars, failed to make the threat of war seem very serious.
Towards the middle of August the small staff I had gathered went off on their summer holidays and I too left Hinton. The situation, even I had to admit, was looking very bad; but it came as a shock to receive a telegram on 29th August to say that the school had been ordered to move into Hinton 48 hours later. I rushed home, and the following day, with the aid of employees and removal men from Winchester, we desperately cleared the house as far as possible of the furniture and carpets which I had lately arranged with so much joy. The Library, it had been agreed, should be kept for storage, and all that could not be piled into it was stacked in the harness-room of the stables. On the last day of the month the house was as clear of its more valuable contents as it could be made in so short a time; and I awaited invasion.
Punctually at 10 o'clock in the morning a fleet of buses drew up at the front door, out poured a crowd of little girls, each carrying a small suitcase, and came shouting and laughing into the house, up and down stairs and into all the rooms. It was a real St. Trinian's scene. But for me it was a moment of intense bitterness: just as the many months of work and effort had reached their culmination, all was snatched from me. Nowadays one is more accustomed to the buffets of fortune, but in 1939 I found it difficult to comprehend that I was being turned out of my own house. However, the situation had to be accepted, and picking up my suitcase, I left.
Within a few days I was fortunate enough to get a very humble job in the Foreign Office, and there I remained for 69 months neither rising nor falling in my status - indeed the latter would have been difficult. The break with my former life was sudden and complete. It resembled having a plaster pulled sharply off one's stomach, the pain was intense but not prolonged. While many of my friends were still floundering and wondering what to do with their lives and their houses, I was already modestly incorporated into the war machine. The department, of which I was a doubtful ornament, worked all round the clock, and although night duty was detestable there was for me a particular compensation in that. The rota was so arranged that we had two completely free days in sixteen. Thus I was able to go to the country and, staying with my mother, keep an eye on the happenings at Hinton. As the war advanced, and I heard of the fate of many country houses in military occupation, I realized how fortunate I was to have my house populated by little girls, although they were hardly angels. I was glad, too, that no decorations had been carried out, so that there was not very much to spoil. In any case there was no doubt that the house was admirably adapted to use as a school.
A couple of months before the outbreak of war, I had agreed, at Lord Gerald Wellesley's instigation, to erect in the dining-room a plaster ceiling designed by Robert Adam, which was about to be destroyed in the demolition of 37 Berkeley Square. This had been Lord Rosebery's house, and in the nineteenth century a singularly ugly scarlet brick facade had been constructed across two eighteenth-century houses, thus giving them the appearance of a single building. The ceiling, of a typically graceful Adam design, was embellished with a number of roundels painted by Angelica Kauffmann, or one of her school. These being on thick paper were detachable. For the plaster itself it was necessary to take a model - a squeeze as it is professionally called - of one-quarter of the ceiling; the whole could then be reproduced in fibrous plaster, and the original demolished. This then was the programme.
In the ensuing turmoil I had forgotten all about this project, but to my surprise in the summer of 1940 I heard from the contractors that the ceiling was ready to be put up and that either this must be done or it would have to be destroyed, as they could not keep it. Since I was given the alternatives, I naturally decided on the former, and during August, when the children of the school had dispersed for holidays, several able-bodied men came down to Hinton and carried out this wholly unnecessary work. It was sadly indicative of lack of organization at that dark period of the war, when invasion seemed far from improbable, that these men could not have been put to more useful work. However, the job was done, and looked very well, although, of course, the decoration was left for a future date.
Slowly and monotonously the years passed, and by the early spring of 1945 it was clear that the war in Europe was in its last phase. I therefore learnt without great surprise, but with intense joy, that the school would not be returning to Hinton after the Easter holidays, and that the house would once more be in my possession. But, alas, my joy was of the shortest. Early in April my agent received a letter saying that a party from the Service Departments and headed by the Astronomer Royal would be coming to Hinton on 16th April to inspect it with a view to compulsorily acquiring it as the new Royal Observatory. One had little resilience at that time and I was cast into utter despair. What could I do? The Service Departments had complete autocratic power: the engagement of Crichel Down at which their tyranny was finally defeated was far in the future. The only opposition I could muster was to meet the party and give vent to my feelings. Therefore, getting leave from the Office, where my work had been by no means receiving my full attention for several days, I was on the doorstep of Hinton when the party of 20 or so arrived.
No host could have had more unwelcome guests, and no guests, as I could easily perceive, had less pleasure in seeing their host. They had not expected that the owner would be present. I led the way into the house, and made what was, I fear, a very emotional oration saying that my family had lived in the place for three and a half centuries and that I would sooner lose an arm or a leg than lose the house, and much else. The party looked acutely embarrassed, not for themselves but for me who was making such an hysterical exhibition; and indeed with the house in its then condition, with paraphernalia of the school in all the rooms, it must have seemed eccentric to feel so strongly about retaining it.
When my little speech was ended the party dispersed to examine the house and garden, while electric machines whirled away in the forecourt testing I know not what. The Astronomer Royal, Sir Harold Spencer Jones, took me aside and spoke kindly to me, but made it apparent that he was not deviating in any way from his nefarious project. After three hours the party withdrew, politely thanking me for their visit. I was not able to return the compliment. After ten days of terrible anxiety my agent received a note from the Admiralty saying rather casually that I should be hearing no more of the matter, as other arrangements had been made. Soon after it became known that Herstmonceux Castle had been bought, which was anyhow in the market.
The end of the war in Europe was now well in sight; on 7th May the German government agreed to unconditional surrender, and it was announced that 8th May was to be celebrated as V.E. Day. It happened to synchronize with my two days' leave from the Foreign Office, so I was able to organize a celebration at Hinton. Feverishly we built as large a bonfire as was possible at short notice on a high point of the ridge between the villages of Hinton and Bramdean, and from the local pub I was able to obtain a barrel of beer. As it grew dark a large concourse from the two villages assembled and at 10.30 precisely the barrel was broached and I set fire to the bonfire. It burned magnificently, the first flames of joy, as opposed to sorrow, that had lit the night sky for five and three-quarter years. From the ridge the dark landscape stretched away northward and southward into the invisible distance. The deep blue scene was suddenly broken by many little points of brilliant light where others all over the countryside were doing as we were, and celebrating the joyful end of the long succession of sombre days. It was a moving sight, as moving I think as the clamorous jubilations in the streets of London. About midnight as the fire died down and the barrel of beer gave out, we dispersed to our homes, I to Hinton where once again after so long an interval I slept in my own bedroom. The ten camp-beds had been removed and one of adult size found for me. That there was no carpet and only black-out over the windows was no hardship: I was at home again at last.
Next day I had to return to London, but a few weeks later I was able to leave my job at the Foreign Office, without grave regrets on either side, and devote myself to the exciting business of making Hinton more or less habitable again. The furniture was brought out of the harness-room, where the damp of nearly six years of storage had had a far from beneficial effect, while when the contents of the library emerged it became clear that large quantities of moth had spent an exceedingly well-fed war. However, the dilapidated chattels were put about so that a few of the rooms assumed a fairly domestic air.
The maculated condition of the walls naturally did not greatly help the general appearance, but after so long a tenancy by the school the condition of the house could not have been expected to be good. I had anticipated finding the walls covered with graffiti which might have formed an interesting study of child psychology; but I was disappointed. Perhaps they had been carefully erased. All I learnt, from a cellar door, was that Miss So-and-So was a So-and-So, and, in another childish hand in another quiet place, that a different Miss So-and-So was also a So-and-So. My studies were thus not highly productive.
The mood of rejoicing for peace soon passed, and those baffling years followed when the only improvement in the way of life seemed to be the release from danger from bombs. Ration cards and tickets continued when adjacent countries, France and Ireland, were suffering none of these restrictions. My particular problem was how to rehabilitate the house. I had been paid a small sum by the school for dilapidations, but I was not allowed to use it in doing any redecoration. It seemed a long time before I was able to paint or paper a single room, and at each application I usually received a permit for one room only.
Gradually, however, the house began to look fairly respectable, but 1949 arrived and the drawing-room was still in the state it had been left by the school - stains on the walls, a large patch on the ceiling and cornice where a bath had overflowed, furrows on the Norfolk House boards of the floor where a grand piano had been pushed backwards and forwards, and so forth - and a permit for restoration was not forthcoming. At last I heard from a firm which was prepared to do the work without a permit. This was strictly against the law, but I trust that the Statute of Limitations holds and that I cannot now be prosecuted for accepting the offer.
The work had to be carried out in considerable secrecy: no prying eyes were to see what was being done. The drawing-room was accordingly cleared, and the men arrived with paint pots, ladders, trestles and all the necessary impedimenta. They worked long hours from eight in the morning till nine at night, and, since it was January and the days were short, a great part of their work was done by electric light. Unfortunately it had occurred to none of us that this large room with five uncurtained windows and a bay blazing with light for several hours each evening would be clearly visible for miles around. What has been happening at Hinton? I was asked by many neighbours who had observed our clandestine operation in progress, and I was forced to give some mumbling and prevaricating reply. Anyhow the room was completed, without police intervention, and looked with its yellow, striped paper extremely well.
During the following decade I was able by sundry purchases gradually to improve the standard of the contents. A certain amount of heavy furniture which had survived from the Victorian house was eliminated and replaced by more attractive things. The drawing-room, however, was allowed to retain a Victorian atmosphere. The rather clumsy white marble chimney-pieces, of which there were two, had been permitted to survive the alterations, with the 1867 cornices and mouldings, including a large plaster star in the Tudor manner in the centre of the ceilings in the south and north sections of the rooms. My grandparents' canary and Prussian blue curtains were adapted to the new shape of the windows, and the vast Edwin Long family group and some other far from interesting nineteenth-century copies of portraits were hung on the walls. A giltwood Hepplewhite suite of settee and chairs covered with the boldest and most brilliant Victorian grospoint, and a nineteenth-century Donegal carpet strewn with cabbage roses provided agreeable pattern and colour.
It must be owned that the room bore little resemblance to its appearance in my grandmother's day. Indeed it was as unlike a typical Victorian room as a Gothic Revival building, such as Strawberry Hill, was to its mediaeval prototype. However, it was light, gay and quite pretty, and I felt I had been right in retaining the nineteenth-century detail when almost all else in the house aimed at the eighteenth century or Regency periods. The library was very successfully designed by Lord Gerald Wellesley in the latter style, with pilasters, marbled like porphyry to marry with the chimney-piece, rising between recessed bookcases, from a marbled skirting.
The dining-room which, as has been said, was an entirely new room, created in the pre-war alterations, had worked out satisfactorily. The proportions were to some degree dictated by circumstances in that its width had to equal that of the drawing room while its depth was much less. The measurements were 27 feet by 21 feet, while its height was adjusted to the floor area; thus it was 2½ feet lower than the the drawing-room but about 18 inches higher than the other ground-floor rooms in the original Georgian block.
The painting of the Adam ceiling had to be delayed until the time when permits were no longer required, for it was not urgent work. At the time of the demolition of 37 Berkeley Square the ceiling had been painted white with the raised design gilded. This was not the original intention, and no doubt had been carried out in the nineteenth century. Fortunately Robert Adam's coloured drawing for the ceiling exists in the Soane Museum, and very brilliant in colouring it is, far more dominant in fact than we nowadays would find it comfortable to live with. However, it formed an admirable guide, and with the colours softened to our less robust taste, the ceiling when completed looked very attractive.
Thus 15 years passed since the war had ended, and the house had reached the state which I had had in mind when work onthe transformation of the Victorian building had been begun in 1936. How lightheartedly I had set out, and with what excitement, mercifully having no knowledge of the difficulties and delays which were to beset the proper completion of the scheme. The operation which I had supposed would take about three years had in fact been drawn out to over 20 - a very large slice of a life - but I now looked forward to being free from any major operations on the house for the remainder of my days. But disaster was at hand.
On Sunday, 3rd April 1960, the weather was particularly unpleasant. There was hardly a trace of spring in the countryside, and a strong south-east wind, almost a gale, was blowing beneath a grey, watery sky. After lunch my inclination was to sit by the fire and read the Sunday papers, but this I felt would be self-indulgent, so instead I went out to the woods for a little beneficial manual labour. Seldom was virtue worse rewarded. As I returned across the park an hour and a half later, I saw to my surprise a thin column of smoke rising above the trees from a position apparently in front of the house. Could this be a misplaced bonfire, I wondered? As I came nearer I suddenly saw through the shrubs of the garden sharp tongues of flame shining brilliantly beyond the bushes.
The catastrophe was now obvious: the house was on fire. I rushed across the garden and found firemen already at work tackling the flames which were for ever spreading. It seemed inconceivable that the house which I had left serene and tranquil so short a time before should now be engulfed in such terrible convulsions. Many more fire engines and firemen soon roared up, and a concourse gathered, for a fire is inevitably a public occasion. There arose the usual difficulty in country-house fires: a lack of water. The main water produced no more than a moderate supply, although it was turned off from neighbouring villages, much to their inconvenience. AH the rainwater tanks and the formal pool were soon emptied, and eventually it was found necessary to carry a pipe down the drive and across the main road to a stream in meadows nearly half a mile away.
Meanwhile the flames fanned by the strong wind spread at a prodigious rate, their terrifying power seeming impossible to halt. At first the fire was contained within the library, where it had started, the books and the thick Georgian walls formed temporarily a barrier, but soon it burst through the ceiling and soared upwards to spread like a mushroom through the attics and so down again into the first-floor bedrooms below them. From outside one could watch room after room being consumed by the flames, and one thought with despair of the contents awaiting their inevitable destruction. Had one realized from the first that almost the whole house would be consumed, it would have been possible to save at least part of the drawing-room furniture, but soon the room was filled with black, putrid smoke, and it would have meant instant suffocation to go into it. The contents of my sitting-room, however, we managed to pass out through the windows although both ceiling and floor were smouldering, and thus not only many papers but also a few of my favourite possessions survived.
It was soon obvious that the whole of the main part of the house was doomed, and the firemen courageously stood in heat and smoke on the roof of the service wing attempting to prevent the flames spreading to that part. With the wind driving from the south-east it seemed a faint hope; but quite suddenly the wind, having successfully aided the destruction of all the main rooms, veered' to the south-west and the wing was structurally saved, although it was naturally completely blackened with grime and water.
As it grew dark it was clear that the fire was under control. Here and there patches of flame were still destroying the woodwork but the horrifying force of the fire was spent and the air was gradually clearing of the thick nauseous clouds of smoke, which had poured from the ruined building for the past few hours. Before midnight there was nothing more to be done. A token force of firemen remained on the site in case of another outbreak, and I went to kind neighbours who housed me for the night.
The return to the house next morning was for me the worst moment of the disaster. During the fire the general tumult had been so great, the whole situation seemed so improbable that one's feelings were numbed by the noise and bustle, but to see in the morning light the gutted blackened structure with gaping windows through which appeared scenes of unbelievable chaos of fallen beams, partly destroyed furniture, mutilated books, was bitter indeed. While from the ruins emanated that despairing stench, that one had come to know all too well in wartime London, of burnt paint and sodden plaster.
On the terrace in front of the house stood the few dejected objects it had been possible to rescue during the fire. These were hurried away into an outbuilding where they were joined by a heterogeneous collection of furniture, objects, pictures which had somehow escaped complete destruction, and seemed perhaps capable of restoration. We found that a large part of the contents of the dining-room was not irreparably damaged as the fire had been stopped as it was descending through the ceiling, while some of the furniture in the ante-drawing-room was not a complete loss. Strangely enough a vast Dresden china clock beneath a glass dome, one of my grandmother's unwise purchases, had survived undamaged.
China, indeed, I was to find as we searched the ruins, had emerged from the ordeal far more successfully than anything made of marble. It was no doubt accustomed to heat, while marble had not experienced it for aeons. Porphyry, one of the hardest of marbles, seemed particularly susceptible, and I could find no trace at all amongst the cinders of the Library chimney-piece which had been my pride.
It was in this grate that the fire had started. There seemed no doubt that a spark from the logs had leapt over the guard and settled on a sofa which was near. Had it fallen on the carpet it would merely have burnt a hole, but materials and cushions are highly inflammable and by the time smoke was smelt the room was burning fiercely.
Hardly a book survived the conflagration. A few which were in my sitting-room emerged unburnt but so saturated with water as to be almost useless. Even when the print was still legible, the stained and twisted aspect of the covers was so repellent, and so unwelcome a reminder of the disaster, that I found it impossible to keep them. In the library every book was destroyed, and also those in a reference library housed in an attic. The former, subjected to intense heat and water, had become almost petrified as if engulfed by a volcanic eruption, and had to be hewn out of the bookcases with pickaxes.
It must be owned that a fire of this magnitude provides one benefit - an immense amount of useless material is destroyed. Whoever has the task of going through papers after my death should feel grateful that the work has been greatly lightened by the flames, and that the amount of lumber has been so effectively reduced.
From the moment that it became clear that the house was practically destroyed, I decided that I would rebuild with the minimum delay. The house was of little real architectural importance, and since the strong outer walls survived, it could be rebuilt so that there would be little alteration in its appearance. It had always been the site and the surroundings which provided the principal charms of the place and with these intact, I hoped that in a year or two the situation would be restored. About the eventual result I was correct: about the length of time required to achieve it I was foolishly optimistic.
Most fortunately Mr. Trenwith Wills who, with Lord Gerald Wellesley, had been the architect of the 1936 alterations was still in practice. I contacted him at once, and within 24 hours of the fire Mr. and Mrs. Wills were surveying the ruins and discussing plans with me for restoration. Within a very short time the scene in the forecourt returned almost exactly to that of 24 years earlier. The huts, the contractor's tackle, the ladders and scaffolding and a great quantity of essential paraphernalia.
Qnce again, as on the previous occasion, we concentrated first on rendering the domestic wing habitable, making the roof watertight, restoring the services, and of course repainting and papering from top to bottom to eradicate the hideous black stains and the stench of despair. A few weeks after the fire I was able to inhabit two small rooms on the ground floor which were to be my home for the next three years.
The domestic wing completed, work was turned to clearing the main body of the house of the vast quantity of de'bris and leaving only those parts which were still sound. In the dining-room section destruction was only partial, and over this a temporary roof was erected, but in the remainder there only survived within the outer shell a few lengths of internal wall on the ground floor: all else had to be carted away as rubbish. Amongst the latter were many broken pieces of the collection of porphyry ornaments, but now indistinguishable in the dust and grime from pieces of broken brick, so all - precious marble and humble brick - went to form a useful foundation for a new cattle-yard at the Home Farm. Perhaps one day the porphyry will come to light again and it will be deduced that there must on this spot have been an important Roman settlement.
This first phase occupied six months, and it was not until October that the shell of the house had been completely cleared of all damaged brickwork and timber, and the site was ready for rebuilding - the fifth rebuilding that had taken place at Hinton since the Tudor house had been erected sometime in the first half of the sixteenth century. Thus I and the architects had had ample time to consider plans, but in fact we had decided on only one major alteration: this was that the attic floor, which had existed over the main part of the house, should not be replaced. The rather high Mansard roof with dormer windows showing over the parapet had always appeared a little too dominant, and furthermore the rooms contained in it had been barely used since the departure of the school. In reinstatement there was to be only one low attic covering the area of the original Georgian section of the house. Thus we were able to lower the height of the house by about 5 feet, and the chimneys as well which had anyhow to be rebuilt, and reduce the number of rooms by ten. In the reconstruction of 1936 we had eliminated the same number, so that the house was now brought to a quite moderate size.
In the interior the alterations were minor. Since almost all the Victorian features of the drawing-room had been destroyed, it seemed absurd to reconstruct it as a nineteenth-century room, for it must be owned that all the detail, chimney-pieces, cornices, door cases and so forth had been singularly clumsy and coarse, and had not married very happily with the Adelphi window linings which I had inserted in the previous rebuilding. The majority of these carved linings had survived, and it was they that formed the note for the new aspect. I was fortunate in finding two late eighteenth-century chimney-pieces, similar but not an exact pair, in which well-carved female figures support the shelf, and also a pair of rather fine door cases from the demolished house of Ashburnham; the rest of the detail, cornices, pillars and entablature between the two parts of the room are modern fibrous plaster of eighteenth century design.
No doubt there is much to be said against a restoration of this sort, indeed against the whole conception of rebuilding what was anyhow largely an eighteenth-century replica. Had I been young perhaps a house in contemporary idiom would have shown more enterprise, but I was not young, and a Georgian fabric was essential as a setting for the furniture and objects which I had every intention of collecting to replace all I had lost. Unquestionably, too, rather spacious eighteenth-century style rooms are both pleasant and practical to live in. So, without a qualm of conscience, I encouraged this atavistic work to proceed.
The library was restored almost exactly as before, but it was not easy to find a chimney-piece of suitable design, and I had given up hope of discovering one of porphyry as had been the previous one, when by good fortune, I found a suitable replacement in an antiquaire on the Quai Voltaire in Paris. It was of simple Louis XVI design in white marble inset with panels of porphyry. At the top of each jamb was the letter 'N' in white marble and in the middle of the frieze a beribboned crown. I was told that it had come from the demolished palace of Saint-Cloud, but even if this were true it seemed difficult to reconcile the pre-Revolution design with the Napoleonic initials. On consulting the history of the palace, however, I discovered that Marie-Antoinette had made alterations there shortly before 1790 which could account for the design, while Napoleon could have added his initial and crown - a reproduction in miniature of the crown which he set on his own head in the famous scene in Notre Dame - in order to impress his personality, as was his custom, on those palaces of the deposed Bourbons which he inhabited. Whether this illustrious provenance is genuine or not, the chimney-piece suits the humble setting of the library extremely well.
The dining-room, with half the Adam ceiling destroyed, presented in some ways an even more depressing spectacle than the two former rooms which had been reduced to bare walls, but we found that enough of the plasterwork had survived to reproduce the missing section. The gods and goddesses in the little pictures had disappeared for ever before the heat and water, and all had to be replaced. I was lucky to find a young artist, Elizabeth Biddulph, who caught the exact sentiment of these small Olympian scenes and the new paintings have the proper eighteenth-century flavour. Thus the room returned to its original appearance and contains a good deal of its former furniture, but all required drastic restoration.
In the entrance hall from which these rooms open only one feature survived, and this was the massive porphyry chimney-piece. It was completely blackened and rather damaged, and appeared at first sight to be beyond repair, but Messrs Fenning, the marble masons, were of the opinion that it could be restored so it was taken out and sent to their works at Putney Bridge whence, after many months, it emerged in apparently pristine condition. Messrs Fenning also carry on the art of making scagliola, the composition which so closely resembles marble as to be almost indistinguishable from it. Before very long four handsome Ionic columns in semblance of serpentine verde with porphyry bases, and with attendant pilasters, had arrived on the site for setting up in the hall. These were erected on a floor of black and white marble, large white squares with small black set diagonally, also provided by Messrs Fenning from plans worked out with minute accuracy by Trenwith Wills. The laying of the floor was not a simple operation, and was one which gave considerable trouble, but it was highly rewarding when finished since, besides looking handsome, it greatly lightened the room which had previously been rather dark.
Not a vestige of the original staircase survived, and one assumes it must have made admirable food for the flames. It was in any case of no beauty as it had been adapted from the Victorian stair. The new one follows the same lines, but has more grace, and also mounts only to the first floor instead of into the now vanished attics. It leads on the first floor to a landing which is given architectural interest by the spanning of each side with wide three-centred arches, while at the end of the short passage leading to the bedrooms over the drawing-room a tall niche was made to form a terminal feature. This was marbled verde-antique and in it was set a white marble vase: it is quite an effective little arrangement. In the Opposite direction a passage leads away past a middle stair on the north side and the door to the bedroom over the dining-room, and so to the service wing.
None of the planning on this floor was materially altered as it had always been satisfactory, and there was a generous supply of bathrooms, but by minor changes it was so arranged that every bedroom had a bathroom opening out of it. Since all the floors had disappeared in the fire we were able to make one improvement which had not been feasible in the 1936 rebuilding. By lowering the ceiling of the drawing-room a few inches and lessening its thickness slightly, it was possible to bring the floors of the bedrooms in this section into happier relation with the windows. Before the fire the bottom sill had been only 6 inches or so from the floor, now it was 14 inches; while in the central section, by a reverse manoeuvre, the sills were just under 2½ feet from the floor instead of 6 inches higher. There is no doubt that the height of windows in a room is a matter of importance. In the Victorian house they had been so extremely ill-placed that I was sensitive on the point.
While on this subject, it is perhaps worth mentioning that all floors are non-inflammable, they are indeed what is known professionally as 'pot floors'. They are constructed in the following way: steel girders (R.S.J.s to the initiated) cross from wall to wall and between them are set re-inforced concrete joists about 1 foot apart; between the joists come the 'pots', that is to say large hollow bricks. Naturally each floor has to be individually measured, so that R.S.J.s, joists and pots fit like pieces of a puzzle. On the top of this is a layer of cement to keep all in place, and above the cement the floor boards -impregnated against fire like all the new timber - are laid on thin battens. There is thus none of the unpleasant rigidity which is inevitable in a solid concrete floor. All this is perhaps not of general interest, but it is a system devised so that fire, should it break out, would be contained within the room where it started. I sincerely trust I may never have to test the efficacy of the construction.
As the structure neared completion it was necessary to consider the decoration and furnishing of all the rooms. Ever since the fire I had been buying furniture, objects and pictures to replace all that had disappeared, and since the form of the rooms was as before it was not an impossible task to acquire what was suitable. I had also bought carpets, for I was anxious that every room should have a carpet of character. But the choice of colour schemes, materials for curtains and so forth was almost beyond my ability, and my unguided taste would probably have led to disaster. However, a guide was at hand in my friend Ronald Fleming, and with his invaluable help the decoration of each room was built up from the colouring in the carpets which I had obtained. The result of our co-operation was highly successful, and the house has, I think, regained the mellow atmosphere it had before the fire, and it is difficult to believe that only a short time ago it was a blackened ruin. Exactly three years and one month after the fire, in May 1963, the house was once again fully habitable.