Of my father’s mother, who was a Scotswoman, a Cheyne from Aberdeen, I have been able to get no information at all beyond the fact that she was ‘a very beautiful woman.’ I can only conclude that most of what she said or did passed unnoticed in the rivalry of family conversations. The Cheyne pedigree was better than the Graves’; it was flawless right back to the medieval Scottish kings, to the two Balliols, the first and second Davids, and the Bruce. In later times the Cheynes had been doctors and physicians. But my father is engaged at the same time as myself on his autobiography, and no doubt he will write at length about all this.

My father, then, met my mother some time in the early ’nineties. He had previously been married to one of the Irish Coopers, of Cooper’s Hill, near Limerick. The Coopers were an even more Irish family than the Graves’. The story is that when Cromwell came to Ireland and ravaged the country, Moira O’Brien, the last surviving member of the great clan O’Brien, who were the paramount chiefs of the country round Limerick, came to him one day and said: ‘General, you have killed my father and my uncles, my husband and my brothers. I am left as the sole heiress of these lands. Do you intend to confiscate them?’ Cromwell is said to have been struck by her magnificent presence and to have answered that that certainly had been his intention. But that she could keep her lands, or a part of them, on condition that she married one of his officers. And so the officers of the regiment which had taken a leading part in hunting down the O’Briens were invited to take a pack of cards and cut for the privilege of marrying Moira and succeeding to the estate. The winner was one Ensign Cooper. Moira, a few weeks after her marriage, found herself pregnant. Convinced that it was a male heir, as indeed it proved, she kicked her husband to death. It is said that she kicked him in the pit of the stomach after making him drunk. The Coopers have always been a haunted family and Hibernicis ipsis Hibernicores. Jane Cooper, whom my father married, died of consumption.

The Graves family was thin-nosed and inclined to petulance, but never depraved, cruel, or hysterical. A persistent literary tradition; of Richard, a minor poet and a friend of Shenstone; and John Thomas, who was a mathematician and jurist and contributed to Sir William Hamilton’s discovery of quaternions; and Richard, a divine and regius professor of Greek; and James, an archaeologist; and Robert, who invented the disease called after him and was a friend of Turner’s; and Robert, who was a classicist and theologian and a friend of Wordsworth’s; and Richard, another divine; and Robert, another divine; and other Robert’s, James’s, Thomas’s and Richard’s, and Clarissa, one of the toasts of Ireland, who married Leopold von Ranke (at Windermere Church) and linked the Graves and von Ranke families a couple of generations before my father and mother married. See the British Museum catalogue for an eighteenth and nineteenth-century record of Graves’ literary history.

It was through this Clarissa-Leopold relationship that my father met my mother. My mother told him at once that she liked Father O’Flynn, for writing which my father will be chiefly remembered. He put the words to a traditional jig tune, The Top of Cork Road, which he remembered from his boyhood. Sir Charles Stanford supplied a few chords for the setting. My father sold the complete rights for a guinea. The publisher made thousands. Sir Charles Stanford, who drew a royalty as the composer, also made a very large sum. Recently my father has made a few pounds from gramophone rights. He has never been bitter about all this, but he has more than once impressed on me almost religiously never to sell for a sum down the complete rights of any work of mine whatsoever.

I am glad in a way that my father was a poet. This at least saved me from any false reverence of poets, and his work was never an oppression to me. I am even very pleased when I meet people who know his work and not mine. Some of his songs I sing without prejudice; when washing up after meals or shelling peas or on similar occasions. He never once tried to teach me how to write, or showed any understanding of my serious work; he was always more ready to ask advice about his own work than to offer it for mine. He never tried to stop me writing and was glad of my first successes. His light-hearted early work is the best. His Invention of Wine, for instance, which begins:

Ere Bacchus could talk Or dacently walk, Down Olympus he jumped From the arms of his nurse, And though ten years in all Were consumed by the fall He might have fallen further And fared a dale worse.

After he married my mother and became a convinced teetotaller he lost something of this easy playfulness.

He broke the ecclesiastical sequence. His great-grandfather had been a dean, his grandfather a rector, his father a bishop, but he himself was never more than a lay-reader. And he broke the geographical connection with Ireland, for which I cannot be too grateful to him. I am much harder on my relations and much more careful of associating with them than I am with strangers. But I can in certain respects admire my father and mother. My father for his simplicity and persistence and my mother for her seriousness and strength. Both for their generosity. They never bullied me or in any way exceeded their ordinary parental rights, and were grieved rather than angered by my default from formal religion. In physique and general characteristics my mother’s side is stronger in me on the whole. But I am subject to many habits of speech and movement characteristic of the Graves’, most of them eccentric. Such as finding it difficult to walk straight down a street, getting tired of sentences when half-way through and leaving them in the air, walking with the hands folded in a particular way behind the back, and being subject to sudden and most disconcerting spells of complete amnesia. These fits, so far as I can discover, serve no useful purpose, and the worst about them is that they tend to produce in the subject the same sort of dishonesty that deaf people have when they miss the thread of conversation. They dare not be left behind and rely on their intuition and bluff to get them through. This disability is most marked in very cold weather. I do not now talk too much except when I have been drinking or when I meet someone who was with me in France. The Graves’ have good minds for purposes like examinations, writing graceful Latin verse, filling in forms, and solving puzzles (when we children were invited to parties where guessing games and brain-tests were played we never failed to win). They have a good eye for ball games, and a graceful style. I inherited the eye, but not the style; my mother’s family are entirely without style and I went that way. I have an ugly but fairly secure seat on a horse. There is a coldness in the Graves’ which is anti-sentimental to the point of insolence, a necessary check to the goodness of heart from which my mother’s family suffers. The Graves’, it is fair to generalize, though loyal to the British governing class to which they belong, and so to the Constitution, are individualists; the von Ranke’s regard their membership of the corresponding class in Germany as a sacred trust enabling them to do the more responsible work in the service of humanity. Recently, when a von Ranke entered a film studio, the family felt itself disgraced.

The most useful and at the same time most dangerous gift that I owe to my father’s side of the family—probably more to the Cheynes than the Graves’—is that I am always able, when it is a question of dealing with officials or getting privileges from public institutions which grudge them, to masquerade as a gentleman. Whatever I happen to be wearing; and because the clothes I wear are not what gentlemen usually wear, and yet I do not seem to be an artist or effeminate, and my accent and gestures are irreproachable, I have even been ‘placed’ as the heir to a dukedom, whose perfect confidence in his rank would explain all such eccentricity. In this way I have been told that I seem, paradoxically, to be more of a gentleman even than one of my elder brothers who spent a number of years as a consular official in the Near East. His wardrobe is almost too carefully a gentleman’s, and he does not allow himself the pseudo-ducal privilege of having disreputable acquaintances and saying on all occasions what he really means. About this being a gentleman business: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled occasionally to get some sort of return.

II

My mother married my father largely, it seems, to help him out with his five motherless children. Having any herself was a secondary consideration. But first she had a girl, then she had another girl, and it was very nice of course to have them, but slightly disappointing, because she belonged to the generation and the tradition that made a son the really important event; then I came and I was a fine healthy child. She was forty when I was born and my father was forty-nine. Four years later she had another son and four years later she had still another son. The desired preponderance of male over female was established and twice five made ten. The gap of two generations between my parents and me was easier in a way to bridge than a single generation gap. Children seldom quarrel with their grandparents, and I have been able to think of my mother and father as grandparents. Also, a family of ten means a dilution of parental affection; the members tend to become indistinct. I have often been called: ‘Philip, Richard, Charles, I mean Robert.’