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southwesterlies by the bulk of Beachy Head (the benefits of sea air were heavily touted by the school’s proprietors). Nan was distraught at the prospect of her chicks’ departure. “Last day, last walk,” she noted sadly in her diary the day before they left. “Everything seems hateful.” At the end of her first visit, she concluded, “Horrid cold place. It was dismal leaving them.”
    Uncle Harold, meanwhile, remained a favorite with Denys. Despite his bachelor status, he was a dedicated family man, deeply involved in the affairs of his clan. It was he who stood up to Edith when she became unreasonably histrionic, and he who took control of a wedding or a funeral when arrangements careered off the rails. He influenced everyone. Harold put a golf club into Denys’s hand when he was still wearing a sailor suit, Harold taught him to stalk deer, and Harold, more than anyone, instilled in him a passion for field sports. The Avunculus Hector, as Denys called him, was a huntsman and a crack shot, and uncle and nephew often tramped together through Evedon Wood or rode to hounds side by side. But it was not just a sporting bond. Harold was his own man, and Denys admired the independent spirit. As a teenager, he often sat alongside his uncle in the red-walled dining room at White’s Club in St. James’s, breathing in the cigar smoke and languid, lordly grandeur while riffling through the gun section of the latest Army & Navy catalog. Harold embraced the Establishment but refused to submit to convention for its own sake, a duality that impressed his nephew. Years later, a school friend remembered Denys speaking frequently of “the ‘Avunculus Hector’ whose life excited him to emulation.”
    In 1885, Harold had written a book called
Advance Australia!,
an entertaining mixture of autobiography and imperial polemic. To celebrate publication, he had a silk coat of arms woven depicting the heraldic Finch Hatton griffin boxing with a kangaroo, and when the book went into a second edition the fact was added to the announcement of the author’s boomerang prowess in
Who’s Who.
At the same time, Harold had embarked on a marathon attempt to win a seat in Parliament, and in 1895 he was finally elected Conservative Member for the Newark Division of Nottinghamshire. (It was the year after the octogenarian Gladstone retired, having seen his last efforts to force through home rule for Ireland defeated in the Lords.) Harold was an active parliamentarian. He kept a house in London at 110 Pall Mall East and went for a run around Hyde Park each morning before walking to the Palace of Westminster to join a debate. Although he was a Conservative in his bones, like all Finch Hattons, he was an independent one, and in 1898 resigned his seat in protest against policies that he felt were at odds with Conservative principles.
    Through all the twists and turns of his career, Harold couldn’t stay still for long. He was continually getting on and off trains to Lincolnshire or Kent, or, beginning in 1891, Harlech in Wales. He had inherited several hundred acres in North Wales from a distant relation. It was an unexpected acquisition but an intriguing one, and it was to shape the lives of everyone in the family for the next two decades.

    WHERE ONE FINCH HATTON broke a trail, others followed, and by the end of the 1890s Henry and his young family were regular visitors to Harold’s main Harlech property, Y Plas, or “the Big House,” a gabled granite-and-shale building that was once a popular coaching inn. Wales was a foreign land to the children—the exotic double consonants of Welsh were unintelligible and the toponyms positively hieroglyphic. The servants were on first-name terms with sprites and elves that danced in pointy hats under a woodland moon, and the peaty hills behind the town were lively with Bronze Age cairn circles, standing stones, Neolithic burial chambers, holy wells, and other sacred sites. Denys loved the proximity of the