Mad Boy, Berners and me

A horse drinking tea in a drawing room furnished with grand antique furniture. A flock of doves dyed in rainbow colours. A man riding naked in the grounds of a country house. A folly built in the shape of a phallic symbol.

It could be part of a painting by Salvador Dali — or perhaps a magical realist novel — but it all really happened at Faringdon House during the 1920s and 1930s house parties of the eccentric Lord Berners and his gay lover, ‘Mad Boy’ Robert Heber-Percy.

Now Robert’s grand-daughter Sofka Zinovieff, 52, who inherited the house from him, has written the story of these extraordinary people in her book, The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me (Jonathan Cape).

She has been a writer since leaving Cambridge University with an anthropology degree — with a brief pause while she dealt with her unusual inheritance, which came to her as a complete surprise in 1987, when she was just 25.

So why hasn’t she written about this before?”

“I always had it in the back of my mind to write about Faringdon, but the time never seemed right. I thought I might move back to Faringdon and write something, but the finances never worked out.”

For the past two decades the house has been rented out while she lived abroad.

By coincidence, she has decided to move back as the book is published, and will be at the Blenheim Palace Literary Festival on September 27 and the Wantage Betjeman Festival on October 28.

Her book starts with her first visit, aged 17, to Faringdon House, “playfully gracious and as enticing as a Georgian dolls’ house”, with multi-colour doves, crystal chandeliers, gilt mirrors, glass domes with stuffed birds.

She knew about the house parties, when it had played host to literary gliterati like the Mitfords and Sitwells, H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh, as well as musician Ivor Stravinsky.

“My mother was not enthusiastic about the glamour or impressed by the famous old friends. She associated the place with snobbery, camp bad behaviour and lack of love and affection,” writes the author.

Robert took them to the top of Faringdon Folly, given to him by Lord Berners as a 21st birthday present. “I told him I’d have preferred a horse,” he claims to have said.

The book describes the stifling upper-class society Berners and Robert grew up in, and then rebelled against.

The author believes their loveless upbringings led to their inability to make real friends, preferring to live life as if on stage.

Robert’s brief wartime marriage to society girl Jennifer Fry astonished their contemporaries, but Sofka discovered from her grandmother Jennifer’s diaries that she had been bitterly disappointed to be rejected by her husband so quickly, although she knew he had a gay lover.

But the author found no firm answers to her questions — did they marry because Jennifer was pregnant, or as a ‘front’ to protect Robert from accusations of homosexuality, which was then illegal? And was Robert really the father of Jennifer’s baby (Sofka’s mother Victoria)?

“Robert was so young when he got involved with Berners and I think she hoped he would change. I think it was not a calculated move to get married — from either of them.”

Sofka says she has taken years to adjust to her inheritance.

“I was so young at 25. I loved the idea, but it was quite outside my experience.”

She has no idea why her grandfather left her the house — there were other, closer relatives — and he never explained.

“He was not called the Mad Boy for nothing.

“I don’t know if we would have got on well if we had really had to see more of each other, but I only spoke to him at weekend house parties.

“He didn’t have a good relationship with his daughter. I think it was a naughty whim to leave it to me. I’m sure that he cackled with glee.”

While her upbringing was bohemian, it was not upper-class. She grew up in Putney where her father, Peter Zinovieff, had an electronic music studio in the basement, with synthesizers used by David Bowie, Paul McCartney or Pink Floyd, along with composers like Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze.

Her parents divorced when she was 11, and she moved with her father to Oxfordshire, where she spent a year at Wheatley Park School before moving to Oxford High School.

While in Moscow researching Red Princess, a book about her paternal grandmother, the Tsarist Russian princess Sofka Dolgorouky, she met her husband, Greek diplomat Vassilis Papadimitriou, and moved with him to London and Rome before settling in Greece in 2001.

She says the years abroad have given her a new perspective on Faringdon House, which had proved a stressful inheritance in the 1980s.

As well as the financial problems, she inherited “a ferocious old housekeeper” and suffered a string of burglaries which necessitated security cameras and fences.

“This will be the first time we have lived there as our home. It’s still got a mid-20th century feel and I have always felt attracted to the quirky, eccentric aspect of the house. That’s what makes it so different from other country houses.

“It has a unique atmosphere. Under a lovely antique mirror you might find something funny or kitsch.It doesn’t take itself too seriously and we have added to that.

“We brought back a bust of Lenin from Russia, for instance, and it’s next to a double bass and a harp.”

The family felt free to move back after both girls left school and Vassilis’s job became part-time, but she says it won’t be for ever.

“We don’t know exactly what the future will bring, but unless we can come up with some incredible business plan our daughters will not inherit it, and I don’t think they would want to.”

Sofka Zinovieff is at the Blenheim Palace Literary Festival on September 27 (blenheimpalaceliteraryfestival.com)