Free Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

sudden jolt. We had been hit broadside by one of the Tremayne brothers with his cackling companion beside him and, with dislocated backs, we were flung into the tangled maelstrom. Philip laughed and moved lazily back to the edge.
    Lucy Dalton will figure at some length in these pages and deserves an introduction, although she was not essentially, I think, a complicated character. Like Serena, she was the recipient, unearned, of most of this world's blessings but at a (slightly) more modest level, which had divorced her a little less from the ordinary human experience. It is always hard for outsiders to perceive the differences in status and possession within an envied, privileged group, but these distinctions exist, whichever ivory tower one is dealing with. Champion footballers, all richer than Midas, know well who, within their crowd, merits envy and who should be pitied. Film stars can easily distinguish among themselves the careers that are going nowhere and the ones that have years more to run. Of course, to most of the public the very suggestion that this millionaire is less to be envied than that one seems pretentious and isolationist, but the gradations are meaningful to the members of these clubs and, if one is to attempt to understand what makes any world tick, they have a part to play in that. So it was with us. The Season in the 1960s, even if the concept was already embattled, still involved a narrower group than it would do today, if anyone were foolish enough to attempt its revival. Looking back, we were a halfway house between the genuinely exclusive group of the pre-war years and the anything-goes world of the 1980s and after. There were certainly girls included who would not have made the grade in the days of Presentation, but they were still made to feel it and the inner crowd was mostly drawn from the more traditional recruiting grounds. Within this set, then, the different levels of good fortune were clear to see and to appreciate.
    Lucy Dalton was the younger daughter of a baronet, Sir Marmaduke Dalton, whose ancestor had received his title in the early nineteenth century, as a reward for pretty routine service to the Crown. The family was still possessed of a substantial estate in Suffolk but the house itself was let in the 1930s and had been a girls' prep school since the war. I would say the Daltons themselves were fairly happy in the dower house, from which, above the trees, they could just about glimpse the scene of their former splendour, albeit surrounded by prefabricated classrooms and pitches for the playing of lacrosse. In other words, it wasn't ideal.
    As a citizen of the modern world, I am now, in late middle age, fully aware that Lucy's upbringing was privileged to an extreme degree. But most humans only compare themselves with people in similar circumstances to their own and I would ask the reader's tolerance when I say that, given the times, to our gang her origins did not seem so remarkable. Her family, with its minor title, in their pleasant dower house, lived much as we all lived, in our rectories and manors and farmhouses, and the important distinction, or so it seemed to us, was between those who lived normally and those who lived as our people had lived before the war. These survivors were our battle pennants, our emblems of a better day, our acknowledged social leaders. With their footmen and their stately drawing rooms, they seemed in magic contrast to our own lives, with our working fathers and our mothers who had learned to cook . . . a bit. We were the normal ones, they were the rich ones, and it was many years before I questioned this. In my defence, it's a rare individual who grasps that their own way of life is extravagant or sybaritic. It is always those much richer than oneself who deserve these sobriquets, and I would say that Lucy never thought of herself as much more than reasonably lucky.
    At any rate, to me she was a cheerful soul, pretty but not beautiful, funny but