For years an intimate friend of my mother Rachel Cecil, Frances Partridge inhabits my memory from early childhood. Before she reached 50, her dark, delicate skin was already seamed with a thousand wrinkles like a very old woman’s, although she remained youthful all her prodigiously long life, retaining an acute power of sympathy. She would ask one searching personal questions and loved arguing, but good-humouredly, despite her strong pacifist and anti-religious convictions which were hotly contested in my home. Her youthfulness showed also in her birdlike gaze and musical, emphatic voice, the hallmark of the Bloomsbury circle with which she was so long associated. My childhood recollections include also her husband Ralph, a barrel-chested, manly presence, florid, pipe between clenched teeth, reputedly a keen nudist.
The Partridges, at their home in Ham Spray, Wiltshire, seem to epitomise a delightful country idyll which quite a few fortunate people, my parents included, enjoyed in the decade before the second world war, despite economic depression and fearsome events in Europe — a literary life enlivened by picnics, bathing in secluded coves, costume balls in country houses thrown by such as Cecil Beaton, and a Wessex landscape still amazingly unsuburbanised, intimate and secret.
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