'What makes me happy is a project'

The nonagenarian writer on a brush with the Almighty and Harold Pinter as critic

- Jane Wheatley

IN January this year, Antonia Fraser woke up in hospital to find her six children surrounding the bed. ‘I thought, good heavens, anyone would think I was dying.’ It was, indeed, what they assumed; a priest had been summoned to give extreme unction. She had picked up an infection following surgery on a broken ankle. In the hospital? ‘Well, they don’t say— only the Almighty God would know and He was not in a very good mood. Anyway, my kidneys packed up and I just shut down. My poor family: they came from Mexico and France, my sister came to have a last view. I knew nothing of all this.’

Home now, but not yet walking, she sits in the corner of a plump sofa, elegantly wrapped in a fall of pale-grey lace. ‘I have a carer —charming, from Goa—and a Zimmer, but it’s a very slow process, my ankle looks simply awful.’ She gives a tiny shrug: ‘But then, why look at it?’ Through the window, the pink petals of a large magnolia are unfurling. ‘I planted that when we moved here 63 years ago.’

Lady Antonia, eldest daughter of the campaigning peer Lord Longford and the writer and socialist Elizabeth Harman, was 23 when she married Scottish Conservative MP Sir Hugh Fraser in 1957, producing six children in 10 years. Her much-praised biography of Mary, Queen of Scots was written with the last baby in a cradle beside her desk. ‘He seemed to like the clack-clack of my electric typewriter. When I stopped, he howled. Writing is a good career for a woman with children and a household to run.’ Between 9am and noon, the door of her study was firmly shut to children or nannies; above the doorbell of the Holland Park house, there remains another marked ‘nursery floor only’.