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drive to the blocky stone portico of the Lamer mansion. The stuccoed brick of the eighteenth-century house was veined with creepers and gilded in the sunlight, a model of restrained neo-classical elegance. Between the pairs of columns at the entrance, a row of starched servants stood to welcome their new master.
    Juggling four small children and two large estates, the General and Evelyn had reluctantly opted to lease Denford and move up to Hertfordshire. Lamer Park needed more looking after, and it was nearer Evelyn’s family. But the move was a wrench. As for changing their name: it was an offence to the strong proprietorial sense of a five- and six-year-old, and Laddie and Lassie bitterly resented being Cherry-Garrards.
    A Lamer manor had existed since at least the fourteenth century and probably much earlier, and the odd medieval arch had survived. The origins of the name (pronounced to rhyme with ‘hammer’) were obscure: it may have come from a De La Mare family who held land in the area in the late Middle Ages. The mansion was one of a band of great houses that circled the capital like a ring road: when the first Sir John Garrard decided to live there early in the seventeeth century a gentleman could get to London easily enough – in a day, if he had a good horse. Sir John and his sons and grandsons rebuilt, extended and adorned, but the house the General inherited was an eighteenth-century creation of chaste simplicity, constructed mostly by Sir Benet in the golden age of the country seat. It stood on high ground, and the Garrards and their landscape gardeners – notably the fashionable Humphry Repton in the 1790s – had created a well-stocked park that rolled away from the front windows of the house, the ground sloping upwards slightly in front of the pillared façade. Framing the mansion at the back, stands of mature cedars were threaded with oak. An avenue of lime trees led off in the direction of Ayot St Lawrence, and in front of the library window a manicured path known as the Chain Walk was festooned with immaculate flower beds. The memoir of a mid-nineteenth-century Ayot neighbour noted that, ‘the balcony opening out of the saloon on the first floor spoke of syllabubs and shady hats and haymaking’.
    Even to children used to Denford, the house was as big as a castle. Immediately inside the front door, the hall gave onto the drawing room on the left and the dining room on the right; they in turn led to the bow-fronted library and the kitchen wing. At the rear of the hall, beyond the staircase, two flanks extended out to the laundry and the old chapel, which now housed the dairy, and from there to the larder, game larder, butchery, brew-house and lamp-room. A warren of rooms at the back and in the attics were occupied by the servants: the housekeeper, a laundress who starched, goffered and ironed, the lady’s maid, the cook and kitchen staff, housemaids, footmen, bootboys, hall boys and a newly engaged nurse and nursery maid. Welbourne, the butler, was quartered next to the pantry in a small room where the silver was stored. He slept with a pistol under his pillow. In the upstairs nursery wing the governess, Mrs Bright, presided over the schoolroom, where three cases of stuffed animal heads fought for attention among a profusion of solid mahogany furniture that exemplified the spirit of the age. The outside servants were led by head gardener Claude Tilbury, whose empire extended to hothouses that produced peaches and muscatel grapes. The lawns were kept short with a horse-drawn mower, the horse wearing special leather boots so his hooves would not spoil the surface.
    To a small boy with a lively imagination and a taste for snails and solitude, the estate was paradise. Laddie tried to catch fish in the old pond in the walled garden. He and Lassie persuaded their mother and Tilbury to hang a swing from the drooping branch of an oak, stole raspberries from the kitchen garden and picked mint and kingcups on