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Victorian Gothic built by Laddie’s grandfather among the beech trees. Constructed from local bricks faced with Bath stone, it seated sixty and featured a bell tower of the elaborately pinnacled variety. Laddie was keen on the pigeons that roosted there, and sometimes, on weekdays, he played on the red tiles with Lassie and his nurse. His paternal grandparents were entombed in the west end, as well as an aunt, and his uncle George Charles. Their chiselled names were not yet worn smooth.
    It was a happy time for them all. E. M. Forster, born seven years before Laddie, described his own youth in a phrase that sums up the background against which the General brought up his young family: ‘I belong to the fag-end of Victorian liberalism,’ 3 wrote Forster, ‘and can look back to an age whose challenges were moderate in their tone, and the cloud on whose horizon was no bigger than a man’s hand.’
    In the summer of 1892 a message arrived from Hertfordshire announcing the death of Honora Drake Garrard, the General’s aunt. She was the 78-year-old widow of his mother’s brother Charles Benet Drake Garrard, and the General had been her sole heir since his own brother had died. The Cherrys were thrown not so much into mourning (they barely knew Aunt Honora) as confusion: they now owned another fortune and another estate, fifteen times bigger than Denford.
    Lamer was only about sixty miles from Denford, but their surroundings were quite different. Thirty-odd miles north of London, Hertfordshire was altogether more benign than Berkshire: it was a gently undulating, loamy expanse of forest and meadow bisected by the River Lea and several great Roman roads. The rise of the railways had brought agricultural prosperity to the region, as the capital was always hungry.
    The Cherrys’ new acquisition was on the edge of Wheathampstead, a village in the Lea Valley in the heart of the county and only forty-five minutes by train from London. The estate covered about twenty square miles and included numerous farms and cottages, half a dozen Elizabethan manor houses and a park and mansion. Garrards had been there for almost 300 years. They came from Kent, and had migrated to London to make their fortune at the end of the fifteenth century. The founder of the modern family and its considerable wealth was Sir William Garrard of Dorney in Buckinghamshire. He was the son of a grocer, and made his money as a haberdasher. By 1555 he had reached the lofty position of Lord Mayor of London. Two other Garrards went on to occupy the position, and a baronetcy was created by James I. When the Tory MP Sir Benet Garrard died without issue in 1767 the baronetcy expired with him, and Lamer was inherited by his distant cousin Charles Drake of Shardeloes, Buckinghamshire. Drake took the name Garrard in addition to his own. His daughter Charlotte married George Henry Cherry, who bought Denford. When Charles’s son died without issue, he left his estate to his wife Honora.
    The General had not just inherited Lamer Park and its estate. There were Garrard lands in other counties, and the family owned a large house in Watling Street in the City of London which was leased to a firm of cotton traders. The Cherrys had certainly gone up a rung: Charles Benet Drake Garrard’s estate was valued at £130,750 gross (well over £6 million in today’s terms). There was only one condition attached to their good fortune: under the terms of his uncle’s will the General had to assume the name and arms of Garrard. The Drake was abandoned, and, by Royal Licence dated 30 September 1892, the name Cherry-Garrard came into existence.

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    Lamer
    Shortly after four o’clock one afternoon in the autumn of 1892, the General, Evelyn and their four small children climbed into a waiting carriage and ascended smartly from Wheathampstead station, trundling past the dog rose and bryony in the hedges, the restharrow on the banks and the furzy brakes on the heath. The horses clopped up the