Free Cherry by Sara Wheeler Page B

Model T, a car most middle-class people could afford, a royal commission to look into traffic congestion: for five years the pages of
The Times
had been crowded with stories about the motor car, and even in Wheathampstead representatives of the species had been sighted. Above ground, since Orville Wright had made the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903, non-flying flying machines had been pranged into apple trees on a weekly basis. More significantly, records were being made in the air with similar regularity. Below ground, too, distances shrank as electric underground trains rumbled out of London’s Baker Street.
    The newspapers were also burgeoning with ugly stories of social unrest. In October the young Liberal politician Winston Churchill made a speech in which he said that the perilous problem of unemployment demanded special remedies; those remedies would lead people into ‘new and untrodden fields in British politics’. This kind of talk made Apsley uneasy. As the country marched towards progress and change, he felt curiously out of step. In his heart he was still a Victorian; in many ways he was to die a Victorian. But, like many men of his background, as he matured he longed to shake off the suffocating effects of his early years. ‘It was not a question of unhappiness,’ explained Lytton Strachey, ‘so much as restriction and oppression – the subtle unperceived weight of the circumambient air.’
    Apsley had the vague idea that he might study law, and he told his mother that this was his long-term plan – though he was not eager to begin immediately. He didn’t need to work at all: the General’s estate had been valued at £102,000 gross (£5 million today), and Lamer alone at £44,052 (over £2 million). Rents flowed in regularly and an extensive portfolio of stocks and shares yielded dividends and bonuses. But Apsley’s spirit was restless, and he was looking for something real – something solid – to occupy his time. He recoiled from the sedate life of the country squire. Those who did not know him expected him to follow in his father’s distinguished footsteps and take up soldiering. He admired his father hugely, but he was not of the warrior caste. Never a natural leader, Apsley was too neurotic for the army, and too afraid of making mistakes. What should he do? He accepted his responsibilities as head of the household, and felt his duty keenly; but he could not yet submit. Furthermore, without its dominating paterfamilias Lamer no longer seemed like home. The girls had created their own cosy domestic world on which external events had little bearing. They helped their mother in charity work, went off to stay with relations and organised heavy schedules of dancing classes, tea parties, plays and concerts. (The suffragettes might have been making progress elsewhere in Britain, but nobody chained herself to the Lamer railings.) Apsley was an outsider, even in his own house.
    Travel offered the perfect short-term escape. Apsley had grown up on the General’s stories of bivouacking on the veldt, and as a schoolboy he had thrilled to tales of tall-masted ships creaking in the pincers of an ice floe and doughty Britons battling malaria as they hacked their way to vast inland seas. He had plenty of money. The problem was that he had nowhere to go.
    In this frame of mind, early in the autumn of 1908 Apsley had taken the train up to Scotland to stay at his cousin Reginald Smith’s bungalow in Cortachy, near Kirriemuir. Smith was the son of one of the General’s sisters. He was thirty years older than Apsley, and when he first swung his young cousin over his shoulders on the Denford lawns he was already a brilliant junior barrister.
    A tall, patrician Old Etonian with dark skin and an elongated face, Reggie had a first-class degree in Classics. Despite having become a King’s Counsel he had abandoned the law in order to head the London publishing firm of Smith, Elder &